Enterprise spending on public cloud services to grow from $91 billion worldwide in 2011 to $109 billion in 2012, according to Gartner.
By 2016, enterprise public cloud services spending will reach $207 billion.
“Business process as a service (BPaaS) still accounts for the vast majority of cloud spending by enterprises, but other areas such as platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are growing faster,” Mr. Gordon Gartner analysts predict.
How much of that revenue will be earned by telecom service providers remains a bit unclear, but one might argue that the faster-growing infrastructure market bodes well.
The global telecom services market continues to be the largest IT spending market, though. Telecom services growth is expected to come not only from net connections, especially in emerging markets, but also in mature markets from the uptake of multiple connected devices, such as media tablets, gaming and other consumer electronics devices.
Worldwide IT Spending Forecast (Billions of U.S. Dollars)
2011 Spending | 2011 Growth (%) | 2012 Spending | 2012 Growth (%) | 2013 Spending | 2013 Growth (%) | |
| Computing Hardware | 404 | 7.4 | 420 | 3.4 | 448 | 6.6 |
| Enterprise Software | 269 | 9.8 | 281 | 4.3 | 301 | 6.9 |
| IT Services | 845 | 7.7 | 864 | 2.3 | 905 | 4.8 |
| Telecom Equipment | 340 | 17.5 | 377 | 10.8 | 408 | 8.3 |
| Telecom Services | 1,663 | 6.0 | 1,686 | 1.4 | 1,725 | 2.3 |
| All IT | 3,523 | 7.9 | 3,628 | 3.0 | 3,786 | 4.4 |
Source: Gartner (July 2012)